Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Milking the Display Network for Leads

The challenge

One of our clients, whom we'll call Rick (because that's his name), uses AdWords to drive online leads to his telephone sales staff to close. In the last months of 2009, he hired additional sales staff to be ready for what he assumed would be a huge spike in January, 2010. Unfortunately, end-of-year results suggested that January sales would be about the same traffic as the previous year, rather than the 30–50 percent increase he was counting on. When we came to us, he was paying as much as he could afford on the keywords he was targeting, and was at a loss about how he was going to be able to generate enough leads to keep his team busy.

The solution

Because Rick was generating leads for his sales staff, and lead generation marketing has a natural affinity for the Display network, that was the first place we looked for additional traffic. When we ran the numbers for the first half of January, 2010 (see Figure 19-1), we found that he was being far too conservative in the Display network, where he was picking up only a fraction of all the available traffic.

Figure 19-1: The Display network wasn't pulling its weight for the lead generation business.

As you can see in Figure 19-1, the Display network had generated only 66 conversions in the first half of January 2010, compared with the Search network's 975. We immediately changed his ...